Put down the Kool-Aid and step away from the keyboard.
Via Philly Com:
It was never going to break through the loud pot-banging of the 24/7 TV-news cycle — not in a week when the president of the United States is facing credible allegations that he’s doing Russia’s bidding from the White House — but there’s a new idea in Washington that could have a real impact on your life and your pocketbook, by seeking to dramatically lower the price you pay for prescription drugs.
And if you’ve been paying attention to U.S. politics the last few years, it won’t surprise you to hear that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was at the center of it.
“If the pharmaceutical industry will not end its greed, which is literally killing Americans, then we will end it for them.” Sanders said in rolling out the innovative proposal that aims to force Big Pharma to charge Americans the same prices as in other developed nations where a trip to the drugstore is considerably cheaper. “The United States pays by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. This has created a health-care crisis in which 1 in 5 American adults cannot afford to get the medicine they need.”
It was a pure Bernie moment, but what’s remarkable about the 77-year-old leader of the democratic socialist movement in the country is how many of these moments there have been in the two-plus years since he rocked the American body politic with an upstart Democratic presidential bid that captured 23 primary or caucus victories against the heavily favored Hillary Clinton. After falling short, no one would have blamed the septuagenarian senator for enjoying the fall foliage on Lake Champlain, cashing the royalty checks from his inevitable best-selling book and playing with his grandkids.
Instead, Sanders has crusaded for progressive causes with the energy of a 27-year-old, and scored some real victories — most notably when he hectored the world’s richest man (for now) Jeff Bezos to pay Amazon’s workers a $15 hourly living wage, and the massive online retailer did exactly that. That was an amazing win at a moment when the GOP still controlled the entire government.
The Vermonter has also been a leading critic of America’s ungodly role in prolonging the war and sparking a large-scale humanitarian crisis in Yemen, gaining bipartisan support for ending the conflict. No political figure has been a stronger advocate for labor, including bringing the power of unions to the Deep South. In 2018 alone, Sanders introduced bills that would end cash bail and break up the most powerful U.S. banks, and continued his fight for a Medicare-for-all universal health-care system. His supporters see that agenda not just as the progressive policies that America needs right now, but as the foundation of another White House bid in 2020.
But here’s the thing: Bernie Sanders absolutely should NOT run for president again.
While his 2016 run was electrifying, historic and changed the direction of American politics, I believe a 2020 bid would prove divisive and could tarnish his legacy. It would also ignore the reality that the senator clearly has a lot more to give his country — but as the spiritual and intellectual leader of the movement that he’s built over a half-century, not as an Oval Office hopeful.
This is a very, very hard thing for me to write. After all, I’m the guy who (for 30 days, anyway) changed my longtime voter registration from independent to Democrat just so I could vote for Sanders in the Pennsylvania primary. Here’s what I wrote, specifically, in the spring of 2016: “On April 26, I am going to vote for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as if my life depended on it. It’s just that important.” The previous fall, with the cadences of the late, great Hunter S. Thompson ringing in my ears, I’d followed Sanders around the country and talked to scores of his supporters to produce an e-book that tried to capture the revolutionary fervor of his movement.